Monthly Archives: April 2018

In the past I’ve blogged about deprecated and discontinued functionality in SSAS 2014 and SSAS 2016; I forgot to check what’s deprecated and discontinued in SSAS 2017 until last week but it turns out that there are a few things that are worth knowing.

A deprecated feature will be discontinued from the product in a future release, but is still supported and included in the current release to maintain backward compatibility. It’s recommended you discontinue using deprecated features in new and existing projects to maintain compatibility with future releases.

A discontinued feature was deprecated in an earlier release. It may continue to be included in the current release, but is no longer supported. Discontinued features may be removed entirely in a future release or update.

As far as discontinued features go it’s straightforward: everything that was deprecated in SSAS 2016 is now discontinued. For SSAS MD that means remote partitions, remote linked measure groups, dimension writeback and linked dimensions are now discontinued; I don’t think these features were ever used by more than a small number of people. Profiler is discontinued too and that’s more of a problem, given that the UI for Extended Events in SSMS remains awful and unusable for the kind of query performance tuning tasks I use Profiler for (I blogged about this issue here). The state of tooling for SSAS is already pretty bad and if Profiler stops working in the future the situation will be even worse; is it right that we have to rely on community-developed tools like DAX Studio and Analysis Services Query Analyzer, however good they are, for tasks like performance tuning?

UPDATE 30th April 2018: it turns out that Profiler was put on the ‘discontinued’ list by accident, and in fact is still only deprecated. The documentation has now been updated appropriately.

There are two important deprecated features:

SSAS Multidimensional data mining. Given that it has not had any new features now for a long, long time (even longer than the rest of SSAS MD) and was never very popular in the first place, I’m not surprised. However the example of Microsoft’s first, failed attempt at brining data mining to a wider audience is interesting in the light of the company’s attempts to do the same thing with Azure Machine Learning and other services. As far as I understand it the technology was never the problem and it was about as easy to use as it could be, so why did it fail? I’m not the right person to answer this question but I suspect the reasons include the following: Microsoft BI customers were not ready for data mining back when it was first launched; customers who did want data mining didn’t want to buy a product from Microsoft; very few Microsoft partners had the skills or experience to sell it; and finally is it even possible to do proper data science in a user-friendly GUI with no coding?

SSAS Tabular models at the 1100 and 1103 compatibility level (for SSAS 2012 and SSAS 2012 SP1). Anyone that is still running Tabular models at this compatibility level really needs to upgrade, because they’re missing out on the great new features that have appeared in SSAS 2016 and 2017.

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A very common requirement when building Power BI reports is to allow the end user to change what is displayed on a chart axis dynamically. A lot of people have blogged about how to do this – Kasper’s blog post here is a great example – but the problem is that all of these solutions involve a lot of work remodelling your data and writing DAX code. However, the good news is that now we have Bookmarks and Buttons in Power BI there’s a new, easy, code-free way of achieving the same result, at least for some chart types. In this post I’ll show you how using the same data that Kasper used in his post.

Say you have the following dataset (using data from the Adventure Works DW sample database) in Power BI Desktop:

…and you need to display a column chart that shows the sum of SalesAmount broken down by either Country, Region or Currency.

The first step is to create a column chart and to drag Country, Region and Currency into the Axis well:

At this point the column chart will show Country and you’ll have the option to drill down – but don’t drill down yet. Add a Bookmark at this point and call it Country. Do not turn on drill down mode, but click on the “Go to the next level in the hierarchy” button:

When you do this, Country will be completely replaced by Region:

Add another Bookmark called Region, then click “Go to the next level in the hierarchy” again to show Currency:

Add a third and final Bookmark and call this one Currency. At this point you should have three Bookmarks for the three drill states:

The last thing to do is to add three buttons to the report linked to the three Bookmarks:

In this case I’ve used the “blank” button type, turned on the Outline, added button text that matches the name of the Bookmark, and set the Action Type property to “Bookmark” and then selected the appropriate Bookmark in the Bookmark property. Here’s how my Country button is configured:

And that’s it. After the report is published (notice that I’ve also used the new ability to turn off the visual header which makes everything look much tidier) you’ll be able to click the three buttons and switch between viewing Country, Region and Currency like so:

Of course this only approach works with visuals like the column chart that support drilldown so you can’t use it in all cases, but it does show off how powerful and useful the Button/Bookmark combination is. Ideally the Selection Pane would be able to control the visibility not just of entire visualisations but also of the fields and measures used within a visualisation, which would enable even more scenarios like this.

For example, imagine you have a table with columns called A, B, C, D, E and F. If you select the columns in the order F, E, D, A, B and C and the select ‘Remove Other Columns’, the columns are reordered in the order that you clicked them:

As you can see from the demo above, ‘Remove Other Columns’ uses the Table.SelectColumns M function behind the scenes and the order the columns are listed in that function is the order that you have clicked them in. A great trick for reordering a large number of columns quickly!

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Maybe this is obvious to more experienced Power Query users, but something I always point out when I’m training people up on Power Query is that the order that you select columns in the Power Query Editor window (both in Power BI Desktop and Excel) can affect the output of certain transformations. For example, say you have a table with two columns A and B that both contain numbers; if you select A first and then B, and then go to Add Column/Standard/Divide, you’ll get a new column that contains the value of the calculation A/B. However, if you select B first and then A and do the division you’ll get B/A:

The order that you select columns is also significant for some other types of calculation such as Percent Of and Power, and also when you do a Merge Columns.

It has successfully detected that it’s looking at a CSV file; the table in the lower half of the screenshot above is the table returned by the Csv.PotentialDelimiters field, and that shows that with a comma as a delimiter three columns can be found (my recent blog post on Csv.Document might also provide some useful context here).

I also pointed it at a few other file types such as JSON and XML and it successfully returned the correct MIME type, but interestingly when I changed the file extension of my JSON file to .txt it thought the file was a text/CSV file, so I guess it’s not that smart yet. I also could not get it to return the Csv.PotentialPositions field mentioned in the documentation for fixed width files so it may still be a work in progress…?

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I think Power BI’s a great tool, but like most Power BI users I have a list of my own pet features that I would like to see implemented to make Power BI even greater. What I would most like to see addressed is the fact that, right now, Analyze In Excel only works with Excel on the desktop but not after you have published a workbook to Power BI. It seems crazy to me (and it’s very hard to explain to customers too) that Analyze In Excel lets you create reports in Excel using PivotTables and cube functions connected to a Power BI dataset, but when you publish your report to a Power BI workspace – so that the Excel workbook and the source data are both in Power BI – the reports stop working because Excel Online cannot connect back to Power BI.

There has been a post on the Power BI Ideas forum about this for some time, but recently I was talking to some guys from the Excel dev team and they told me that it’s actually something they, not the Power BI team, need to address. Therefore I created a post on the Excel UserVoice forum too:

Please vote for it! The more votes it gets, the more likely it is to be implemented quickly. Ken Puls managed to get a lot of votes for his idea to improve Power Query performance, and since that’s now in the process of being implemented it just goes to show that voting does influence what the Excel dev team works on.

Why is this important? In my opinion, Power BI is not a good ad-hoc data exploration tool and isn’t intended to be – its strengths lie elsewhere. However people do want to explore data stored in Power BI and an Excel PivotTable is the ideal way to do this (the Power BI matrix visual is very limited in comparison), and after you have found something interesting it’s only natural that you should want to share it. PivotTables aren’t the only thing Excel has to offer though: I’m a big fan of cube functions too, especially for creating financial reports, and Power BI has nothing remotely like them. Finally, don’t forget all those people who want to build reports in Excel because it’s Excel and that’s what they know. All in all getting this feature implemented would be a major boost for Power BI and broaden its range of capabilities.

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As well as being a blogger, I'm an independent consultant specialising in Analysis Services, MDX, DAX, Power BI, Power Query and Power Pivot. I work with customers from all round the world solving design problems, performance tuning queries and delivering training courses, and I am happy to work on short-term engagements. For more details see http://www.crossjoin.co.uk